Hello Cheer4Today Readers, It's Jessica again. It's been a couple months since I last submitted a blog to Cheer4Today. We are entering a new cheer season here on the West Coast. I took some time to think about what I really wanted to talk about this time. Usually, I talk about the cute things I do for my girl's teams, but this blog is going to be a bit different.
Let me first start by saying my children both love their gym and they have been there for many years. My oldest daughter "C" has cheered for 12 years and 8 of those years were with this gym. They have great kids, great coaches, and overall a great program. So this is why, when my daughter's attitude toward her cheer team and practice changed, I was a bit surprised to say the least. Everyone who knows me knows I am very active in my girls' lives and immediately I got involved and became a cheer mom detective. after a couple weeks, I got my daughter to open up and she told me that recently they had a few new girls come into the gym and join their team. They were very talented and deserved to be on the team, but they were extremely rude with "C", talked down to her like she wasn't capable of doing the routine, and at times made her feel like she didn't belong. "C" was really bothered about it and it made me sad that something she loved so much and had been involved with for so long might taken away from her because of these girls. I also asked her how the coaches were handling it. She said that because she was on an older team that the coaches didn't watch things as closely and she wasn't sure that they even knew how she felt or what was being said. The mom in me wanted to march right in there give those girls a piece of my mind and be that super hero mom that just makes everything ok for my daughter. As a parent, we never want to see our children feel hurt, but I knew that wasn't the answer either. "C" needs to stick up for herself, she needs to let her coaches know how she feels and then I can step in if needed. It was hard to take a "back seat" to this, but my baby is growing up and I am not doing my job if I don't provide her with the tools to fix situations for herself. My the end of the 2018-2019 season, all the problems were resolved and team placed very well in their last competition of the year.
This was a situation my children and I had never dealt with before, but we got through it. I wonder have you or your child experienced anything like this? How did you or your child handle it? Feel free to comment on this blog, but please be sensitive to identifying specific people. We don't want to be part of the problem. Be Nice! :-)
Keep Cheering,
Jessica
